More than 70 concerned parents are petitioning for the replacement of all board members at the Regina Early Learning Centre.
The petition is calling for the preschool program that helps low-income families, to be reinstated after it was cancelled due to financial restraints.
The centre has sat in the city’s Cathedral area since its opening in 1977 and remains a pillar to many in the community.
“You build this relationship with the support staff where they become like family,” says Courtney Kydd, whose five children all attended the program.
“It’s a beautiful thing and I’ve seen families come from hard circumstances, become the best parents they can be and then turn around and work for this organization to help.”
It all began with the late Anne Luke, a person who saw a need in the community: that low income and Indigenous families were not getting the same care and attention when it came to education. Luke made the decision to quit her steady teaching job to invest her life’s work into Regina’s less privileged families, and founded the organization.
In an interview before her passing in 2022, she said, “It bothered me a lot that there was such a gap. If you were wealthy, you could afford to send your child to a Montessori program or preschool program. If you were working, you could access daycare services. But for moms that were caught between the cracks of those situations, there was nothing … nothing for the children.
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“So the reason was to fill a gap, but not just to fill a gap with the same-old-same-old, but to do it differently and bring a new vision to what early childhood education could look like.”
The preschool lies at the heart of the organization and works in conjunction with support programs for parents, focusing on the children as a family unit. This is a method called the Reggio Emilia approach, which has earned the school both provincial and national recognition. The approach is a type of early intervention education that empowers people to become their best version, in order to support their children’s education in the most holistic way.
Kydd says the program was cut without any communication to parents or teachers, adding that the food program and transportation to the school were cut this year in the same way, which the majority of its parents relied on.
The program used to cost parents only $40 a year. The switch to $ 10-a-day daycare making it no longer affordable for the majority of the parents.
Kydd says, “They completely cut parents out … but it’s our children, this is the community it serves, you should listen. I’m not asking for you to let us run everything, but you’re not even listening to us, you’re not even communicating with us at all.”
There’s still hope for some parents as advocates fight back.
Former employee, long-time volunteer and advocate for the centre, Gary Robins, says the preschool has been a stable resource in his neighbourhood for almost 50 years now, and he won’t see it go without a fight.
“It’s not that there isn’t a great need for daycare centres and daycare spaces in the city or around the province, but to close down a preschool like this and to replace it with a daycare is such a profound step backwards. And eliminates some important opportunities for most of those families in need.”
According to the regulations of the Non-Profit Corporations Act, an organization can call a special general meeting to discuss concerns if 10 per cent of the membership signs a petition. More than 90 per cent of the membership signed that petition.
“It’s led to a situation whereby there is a huge group of parents involved with the Early Learning Centre that have signed a petition wanting to remove the entire board,” Robins said. “They’ve lost confidence in the board and they’ve called for a special general meeting to remove the board and elect a new board.”
Global News reached out multiple times to the learning centre for an interview and so far has only been directed to a press release issued in June stating the change was made to address a $300,000 deficit and loss of a donor.
Hannah Sangster has more in the video above.
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